Summary of SREcon17 Americas - So You Want to Be a Wizard

00:00:00 - 00:35:00

This talk is about how to become a wizard by understanding your systems. The speaker explains how to build a basic understanding of concepts, how to be innovative, and how to do homework by reading code and books. They conclude by saying that understanding systems is helpful in solving problems.

• 00:00:00 This talk is about how to be a wizard, starting with understanding your systems. Six skills are discussed, including understanding jargon and developing harder problems. The first skill is understanding fundamental concepts. The second skill is innovation, which is made possible by understanding the systems you work with. Finally, there is homework: building a terrible TCP stack from scratch.
• 00:05:00 The speaker explains how running out of memory can lead to a computer's operating system starting to kill off processes and files. He also describes some experiments he conducted while attending SREcon17 Americas, including writing a keyboard driver from scratch and understanding how the operating system works by reading a book on networking. He concludes the talk by saying that understanding systems is helpful in solving problems, and that working with the thing in one's job can also help.
• 00:10:00 In this video, Julia reveals some of her favorite techniques forasking questions and getting the information she wants at work. She advisesremembering to ask someone who knows the answer but is notnecessarily the most experienced person, and trying to avoidasking the most experienced person. These techniques help herorganize her thoughts and reduce the load on experiencedpeople, while also helping everyone grow and establish theirknowledge.
• 00:15:00 The speaker discusses how asking questions in public can lead to a better understanding of how something works internally. She also discusses how reading code can be helpful for debugging.
• 00:20:00 The video discusses the issue of client and server latency, and how it can be improved. It turns out that the issue is due to delayed ack responses in TCP, and can be fixed by disabling the TCP "no delay" flag. After fixing the latency issue, the developers became better at debugging.
• 00:25:00 This YouTube video demonstrates how Python can do 10 million per second loops, how to debug Python programs, and how design small projects. Julia explains that one way to reduce anxiety when working on projects is to design them as small as possible, and that this helps her to communicate with other team members effectively.
• 00:30:00 This video's presenter encourages viewers to ask questions of others, and to try difficult but important projects. He cites the example of reading a 200-page book about Linux, something that would be difficult but important.
• 00:35:00 The speaker explains how virtual memory works and recommends that people learn something new to expand their comfort zones. They end the talk with a gift of a Xenova computer networking device.